Word: sheed
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CLARE BOOTHE LUCE by Wilfrid Sheed; Dutton; 183 pages...
...famous beauty, an even more celebrated playwright, a magazine editor, an actress. She was the wife of Henry R. Luce, co-founder of Time Inc. She had been a Congresswoman and was on her way to becoming an Ambassador. It was small wonder that when 18-year-old Wilfrid Sheed met her he was awestruck. Her intimidating husband, the novelist-critic recalls, "summed me up with brutal accuracy as someone he didn't have much to learn from, certainly not enough to crank up his famous stammer for." But Clare Boothe Luce was something else. At 46, she remained...
Irving took his unfinished manuscript to Henry Robbins at Button. Robbins, who died of a heart attack two years ago, was one of the outstanding fiction editors of his generation. The editor of Joan Didion, Wilfrid Sheed and Stanley Elkin, he responded ecstatically to the new work. Wrote Robbins in a report to his bosses: "A major novel about a wonderfully eccentric mother and son, very funny and very moving at the same time. Sure to be the 'breakthrough' book by an immensely talented novelist in his mid-30s." His faith in Irving was backed...
First copies of the Dial, a slick new monthly about television, were winning rave reviews from charter subscribers this month. Billed as a program guide to public television, the Dial also features articles by first-class writers: Wilfrid Sheed on sports, Auberon Waugh on Alec Guinness, Stanley Kauffmann on acting. But the magazine was unexpectedly panned by the House of Representatives, then by the U.S. Postal Service. Reason: the Dial- which will be sent to 650,000 PBS-TV supporters in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., as part of their $25-minimum contribution-is bursting with...
Most of these pieces appeared in the New York Times Book Review, for which the reviewer wrote a column, now regrettably defunct, called "The Good Word," or the New York Review of Books. Sheed's opinions seem right most of the time, but not so invariably right as to be insufferable. Too much Tightness shuts off debate and stifles the thought process. Sheed provides a good mixture of wisdom and nonsense, so that the reader finds himself saying, "Yeah, yeah, right," and then, "Now wait a minute!" He is properly appreciative of Edmund Wilson, sound on Walker Percy...